Own money not spent

Since Welner is employed as a professor of bilingual education, I found his defense of that failed doctrine hardly surprising. However, some of his central facts were in error.

He alleges that I funded a massive advertising campaign to persuade the voters of California to dismantle their bilingual programs in 1998. This is complete nonsense. I scarcely spent a dollar of my own money on advertising, and overall, our campaign was outspent approximately 25-to-1 in that area, nonetheless winning the greatest landslide victory of nearly any initiative in 20 years. Given the rapid and dramatic subsequent rise in the academic test scores of over a million California immigrant students, I hope our initiative in Colorado will achieve an even greater victory.

Colorado voters should note that while nearly all the leading opponents of bilingual education in their state are Hispanic, advocates of bilingual education still haven’t managed to find a single prominent Hispanic willing to defend their disastrous Spanish-only system, which has already destroyed the lives and educations of so many young Hispanic children.